In a meeting with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt in Paris on Monday, France's President Francois Hollande threatened to put through legislation that would force Google to pay publishers for indexing their stories on Google News unless an alternative agreement was realized by the end of the year, according to a statement released by the president's office.
Google in turn threatened to stop indexing articles from French publications altogether, Reuters reports.
A spokesperson for the company could not be immediately reached for comment.
Google, as the search giant has argued previously, doesn't believe it should have to pay publishers to display headlines and article ledes on Google News because it sends so much traffic to news sites -- approximately 4 billion clicks per month, a Google spokesperson said at a media conference in São Paulo earlier this month.
But many publishers believe they should receive a cut of the revenue Google earns from running ads alongside excerpts of their content on its own website.